Barbara Ladd, Page 3

  CHAPTER III.

  The child who set forth so fearlessly, on so audacious andill-regulated a venture, that midsummer morning of the year 1769,--in atime when audacity on the part of small girls was apt to meet thediscouragement of a peculiarly strenuous discipline,--was an accidentin her period, an irreconcilable alien to her environment. In herintense individuality, and in the confident freedom with which sheclaimed the right to express that individuality, she belonged to anearlier or a later day, but not to a New England of the eighteenthcentury. Two years before, at the age of twelve, an age when otherchildren's personalities were colourless to the eyes of their elders,she had been projected into the tranquil routine of the little world ofSecond Westings. It was an established, crystallised, unchanging lifethere in the back country of Connecticut, where hours, seasons,actions, habits, revolved in so orderly a fashion as to have wornthemselves grooves out of which they could hardly even look, still lessachieve to deviate. Into this rigid placidity the dark child came likea grain of ferment; and presently, no one could tell just how, the massbegan to work. Barbara was everywhere discussed. She was ratherunanimously disapproved of. And, nevertheless, as it were in the teethof all probability, she won to herself here and there a friend.

  At the time of Barbara's transplanting from the cordial soil ofMaryland to the austere uplands of Connecticut, her father, theReverend Winthrop Hopkins Ladd, clergyman of the Established Church,had been dead over two years, and the child's hurt, as such thingswill, had outwardly healed; though the hidden wounds would agonise inher heart at unexpected times, set vibrating to some poignant touch ofscent or sound or colour. The child had adored her father with atempestuous and jealous devotion, which, however, had not prevented herwaywardness from diversifying his repose with many a wakeful night.Her mother, who had died when Barbara was scarce out of arms, had beena bewildering birth from the kiss of North Wales on the warm south ofSpanish passion. The son of an old Welsh family, adventuring to theNew World to capture himself a fortune, had captured himself also awife to beggar envy. Where or how he got the fortune, no man knew andfew presumed to wonder; but where and how he got the wife was matter ofnoonday knowledge. He saw her at church in New Orleans. There werelooks that burn and live. Through that emotional spring Glenowensniffed the incense of more masses than he had thought to attend in alifetime. Once there was a stolen word behind a pillar, eyes warilyaverted. Twice notes passed from hand to hand. Then a girl, thedaughter of one of the haughtiest houses of Colonial Spain, wasaudaciously carried off by night from a convent school in the safeheart of the city. When next seen of the world, she was Glenowen'swife, most radiantly and graciously dispensing an accepted hospitalityin Baltimore.

  The result that in particular pertains to this history was a small,flame-like, imperious girl, one Mistress Mercedes Glenowen, who, fromthe night of ceremony when she first made her bow to the governor andjoyously turned her disastrous eyes upon the society of Baltimore, forthe space of some three years dispersed vain heartache throughout thecolony. Into the remotest plantations went the name of her and thefame of her--and too often, also, the sickness of a hopeless desire ofher. There were duels, too, discreetly laid to other cause; and oldfriendships changed to hate; and wild oaths made perjury. But theheart of Mistress Mercedes went free. A quiet young clergyman, akinsman to the governor, came to Baltimore from Boston, on his way to acountry parish on the Pawtuxet, to which he had just been appointed.Dining at Government House, he met Mistress Mercedes, but his eyes,being at that moment immersed in dreams, looked not upon but throughand beyond her. Mercedes could not rest an instant until thosefar-wandering, Northern eyes were ensnared, imprisoned, and denied arange beyond the boundaries of her heart. But the capture was not aquick one, and in the interest of it she had the accident to becomeherself entangled, to such a degree that she had no longer any use forfreedom. And so it came about, to the wrathful amaze of her retinue,but the unspeakable content of the Reverend Winthrop Ladd, that thedark rose of Maryland was on a sudden removed from Baltimore to bloomon a churchly plantation by the pale waters of the Pawtuxet.

  Mr. Ladd, though a dreamer so far as consisted with outdoor life andsanity of brain and muscle, was a strong man, one of those who have theforce to rule when they must, and the gentleness to yield when theymay. In the passionate completeness of her love, Mercedes sloughed thecaprices that would have pained and puzzled him, forgot the very echoesof the acclamations of her court, and lived in the sanctuary of herhusband's devotion. For nearly three years the strangely assortedlovers dwelt in their dream, while the world passed by them like apageant viewed through a glory of coloured glass. Then a suddensickness tore them apart; and when the dazed man came slowly back tothe realisation that he had been left to live, all his love, with allthe illusion of it, centred itself fixedly upon the little one,Barbara, whom Mercedes had left to him.

  As Barbara grew more and more like her mother, her ascendency over herfather grew more and more complete. Tenderly but firmly he ruled hisparish and his plantation. But he gradually forgot to rule Barbara.Too nearly did she represent to him all that he had lost in hisworshipped Mercedes; and he could not bring himself to see anything butfreshness of character and vigour of personality in the child's veryfaults. Hence he evolved, to suit her particular case, a theory verymuch out of harmony with his time, to the effect that a child--orrather, perhaps, such a child as this of Mercedes--should not begoverned or disciplined, but guided merely, and fostered in the findingof her own untrammelled individuality. This plan worked, for the time,to Barbara's unqualified approval, but she was destined to pay for it,in later years, a heavy price in tears, and misunderstandings, andrepentance. With the growth of her intense and confident personalitythere grew no balancing strength of self-control. Unacquainted withdiscipline, she was without the safeguard of self-discipline. Beforeshe was eight years old she held sway over every one on the plantationbut herself,--and her rule, though pretty and bewitching, was notinvariably gentle. As for her father, though ostensively her comradeand mentor, he was by this time in reality her slave. He rode withher; he read with her; he taught her,--but such studies only asensnared her wayward inclination, and with such regularity only as fellin with her variable mood. The hour for a lesson on the spinet wouldgo by unheeded, if Barbara chanced to be interested in the moreabsorbing occupation of climbing a tree; and the time for recitingLatin syntax was lightly forgotten if berries were a-ripening in thepasture. Under such auspices, however, Barbara did assuredly growstraight-limbed and active, slight and small indeed, by heritage fromher mother, but strong and of marvellous endurance, with the clearblood red under her dark skin, her great gray-green eyes luminous withhealth. Her father devoted to her every hour of the day that he couldspare from the claims of his parish. In a sunny and sandy cove nearthe house he taught her to swim. Rowing and canoeing on the Pawtuxetwere mysteries of outdoor craft into which he initiated her as soon asher little hands could pull an oar or swing a paddle. A certain strainof wildness in her temperament attuned her to a peculiar sympathy withthe canoe, and won her a swift mastery of its furtive spirit. In thewoods, and in the seclusion of remote creeks and backwaters, herwaywardness would vanish till she became silent and elusive as the wildthings whose confidence she was for ever striving to gain. Heradvances being suspiciously repelled by the squirrels, the 'coons, andthe chipmunks, her passion was fain to expend itself upon the domesticanimals of the plantation. The horses, cattle, dogs, and cats, allloved her, and she understood them as she never understood the nearestand best-beloved of her own kind. With the animals her patience wasuntiring, her gentleness unfailing, while her thoughtless selfishnessmelted into a devotion for which no sacrifice seemed too great.

  The negroes of the plantation, who seemed to Barbara akin to theanimals, came next to these in her regard, and indeed were treated withan indulgence which made them almost literally lay their black necks inthe dust for her little feet to step on. But with people of her o
wnclass she was apt to be hasty and ungracious. _Their_ feelings were ofsmall account in her eyes--certainly not to be weighed for a momentagainst those of a colt or a kitten. There was one sweet-eyed andlumbering half-grown puppy which Barbara's father--not for an instant,indeed, believing anything of the sort--used to declare was moreprecious to her than himself. But her old black "Mammy" 'Lize used tovow there was more truth than he guessed in "Marse Ladd's foolin'."

  However, when a fever snatched the gentle priest away from the scene ofhis love and kindly ministrations, the child's true self emergedthrough its crust of whim and extravagance. Stricken beyond a child'susual capacity to feel or realise such a blow, she was herself seizedwith a serious illness, after which she fell into a dejection whichlasted for the better part of a year. In her desolation she turned toher animals rather than to her human companions, and found the more ofhealing in their wordless sympathy.

  At last, youth and health asserted themselves, and once more Barbararode, paddled, swam, tyrannised, and ran wild over the plantation,while relatives from Maine to Maryland wrangled over her future.

  There was one young uncle, her mother's only brother, whom Barbaradecided to adopt as her sole guardian. But other guardians came toanother decision. Uncle Bob Glenowen was an uncle after Barbara's ownheart, but a little more disciplined and reasonable than herself. Thetwo would have got on delightfully together--together careering overthe country on high-mettled horses, together swimming and canoeing atthe most irregular hours, together lauding and loving their four-footkindred and laughing to scorn the general stupidity of mankind. ButUncle Glenowen had little of gold or gear, and his local habitation wasmutable. He loved Barbara too well not to recognise that she shouldgrow up under the guidance of steadier hands than his. It was finallysettled--Barbara's fiery indignation being quite disregarded--that sheshould go to her father's younger sister, Mistress Mehitable Ladd, inSecond Westings.

  Mistress Ladd was a self-possessed, fair-faced, aristocratic littlelady, with large blue eyes and a very firm, small mouth. She wasconscientious to a point that was wont to bring her kindness, at times,into painful conflict with her sense of duty. The Puritan fibre ran inunimpaired vitality through the texture of her being, with the resultthat whenever her heart was so rash as to join issue with herconscience, then prompt and disastrous overthrow was the least herheart could expect for such presumption. In the matter of Barbara'sfuture, however, Distress Mehitable felt that duty and inclination rantogether. She had loved her brother Winthrop with unselfish andadmiring devotion, and had grieved in secret for years over hisdefection from the austere fold of the Congregationalists to what sheregarded as the perilously carnal form and ceremony of the Church ofEngland. Her hampered spirit, her uncompleted womanhood, yearnedtoward Barbara, and she shuddered at the idea of Winthrop's childgrowing up untaught, unmothered, uncontrolled. She made up her mindthat Barbara should come to Second Westings, become a daughter to her,and be reared in the purity of unsullied Congregationalism. With asigh of concordant relief it was recognised by the other relatives thatMehitable was right. They washed their hands of the child, and forgother, and were thankful--all but Uncle Bob. And so Barbara went toSecond Westings.